311–320 of 400 posts
I think it's connected with the rise of bullshit jobs. If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world. The app/design is your deliverable that anyone can see and judge. If your job is a poorly defined "management" or "product ownership", with no real deliverable, how can your work be judged? Your job turns into convincing other people that your job is useful. Wo…
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> it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses. Whi…
> Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. This isn't a remote problem. I see this _all_ the time with people at work now and I don't work remotely. This is more of a personal issue -- some people do it consistently, others don't. I never had that problem working remotely, and I don't pretend to be somewhere else in my regular repo…
One solution that usually works for me is to get a standing workstation and use it. Not one of those fancy ones that go up and down. Just one that is permanently up, like the Ikea standing desk hack. For a break, you can move and sit somewhere else. Standing takes a lot more energy, so, it is my belief, that you focus better because if you are standing and goofing off, you are wasting precious energy. There are times where you don't have the energy to stand but need to work - so just sit. Standing and sitting is not a either/or thing. You don't have to be faithful to your standup desk, go slouch in a couch for a break.
The biggest difference between standing and sitting is that walking away from your workstation is friction-free. You just move your feet.
I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well. What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like: - a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office pol…
What you ignore is that the amount of work a person can do is finite. I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do. I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of ti…
But regardless you need to put in the same effort documenting in person. Being able to talk over a solution doesn't help anyone when you've left the company.
In my dynamic (with young kids), any attempts to work later than 20 min past the predetermined closing time are often met with baby/kids being "let loose" on Dad.
For the family, it's a plus. But sometimes ... holy shit I have stuff I need to finish.
Finally, it is SO convenient for spouses when their partner works from home. SO convenient. E.g. child care/babysitters fall through guess who gets to not get work done.
Overall, the ROI is pretty positive ... but I've been doing this a long time, and I do miss the office.
We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesse…
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No, ideally they know how to do their job well and do that instead of getting in your way. Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.
Hm, not sure. My first boss 'managed' by assigning tasks to people and recording start/finish date in an Excel sheet. Multiple week projects were the same as one-day fixes of they made it on to the sheet. I was 'managed' by having my task completion times compared to 15yr developers, and given no feedback other than to work faster. We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program…
Do not allow your experience with a bad boss to clutter your thinking about how a good boss would handle things.
I think remote work will increase just because society will realize how much energy it wastes commuting. A 15 mile commute both ways uses the equivalent of the energy used by a house in day.
If we get fusion then things will change, but for now it seems like this is one of the best untapped was to conserve energy.
I anticipate that ways for the boss to watch remote workers like always on video conferencing or collaborative workspaces will also become more popular.
I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well. What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like: - a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office pol…
"Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen. " Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time . If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a respo…
It's droll that Slack is the name of the service chaining you to notifications. I wonder if that was deliberate.
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No, ideally they know how to do their job well and do that instead of getting in your way. Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.
How does a boss who does not know how to do your job assess your performance? Without intimate knowledge of the tasks you do they have no idea of what you are asked to do is intrinsically hard or you are simply doing it badly.
The above assumes a single developer. If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases: those who know the new guy see him trying to get up to speed, while the boss sees a bigger picture by comparing to others. (a good developer will be making useful contributions on the second day, while a bad one will flounder for a couple weeks before the others will give up on teaching him the project)
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> it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses. Whi…
> Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. This isn't a remote problem. I see this _all_ the time with people at work now and I don't work remotely. This is more of a personal issue -- some people do it consistently, others don't. I never had that problem working remotely, and I don't pretend to be somewhere else in my regular repo…